Putting it all on show!

Harry Potter: This is one way to inspire your classes.

Classroom displays are great things. They brighten up the room and can cheer up the most miserable of walls, but the best ones are useful.  Ever since my NQT year many moons ago when I was given my first classroom all to myself I have tried use the walls, windows and, in one very interesting year, the ceiling...

I have nothing but admiration for the 'Pinterest-Ready' teachers, theming their classes every year. This teacher's dedication to his Harry Potter plan was astounding!

Being inspired by a Beijing history classroom...

It would be wonderful to decorate my history room like a Medieval castle or Tudor banqueting hall. But sadly I don't have the time or the cash to splash on such things. (the UK £1 shops have nothing on Dollar Tree unfortunately.)

Also, I fear it could actually limit students' learning. If they are studying the Vietnam War and its impact on the USA, being in a room decorated as a Victorian Work House will be of not benefit to them.  (Unless of course they catch the work ethic!)

Therefore I prefer useful, subject specific display material that my students can use to support their understanding of the topics we are working on.   Below are some of the things you will find in any classroom I'm responsible for:

STUDENTS' WORK

Mind-mapping revision that will
be put up on display as a tool.

One of the most powerful tools in my teaching arsenal is displaying my student's work.  It can take a variety of forms.   On my desk is a giant clothes peg and clipboard.  I use this to display any piece of work that I feel deserves recognition. It can be classwork or home work, but it exemplifies the effort of the child.  It doesn't have to be particularly neat or beautiful to earn 'Work of the Week' status either.  The younger years love this as they often have project based homework from history, but the slightly more cynical upper school kids have been known to a smile when I have selected their work for display. Everyone likes (quality) praise and moody teenagers are no different in my experience, even if it is only shown on the inside...


Another way I use students' work is with model answers.  Our curriculum repeats each year and having things on the walls that they can use to work out what they need to produce has proved valuable to my kids.  I'm not suggesting having something they can copy word for word, but examples of how others have made notes on a given topic or how to mind map are useful to those who have never done it before.  'What A Good One Looks Like' (or WAGOLL) is part of most curriculums for a reason.

INSTRUCTIONAL DISPLAYS:

In history one of the things we spend the most time on is how to write up your ideas.   History is a subject that often requires a high level of literacy to access the highest grades and so developing this is time well spent.  One of the most successful instructional displays I have in my classes is my P.E.E.L. display.    Its actually a large version of my P.E.E.L. literacy mats. The students can use them individually or take a quick look at the wall for connectives and frame their writing.    It was so widely used by my students that we built the department KS3 assessment attainment descriptors to match it. They are skills-based descriptors;

Assessment attainment criteria

• EMERGING = IDENTIFY = POINT
• DEVELOPING = DESCRIBE = EVIDENCE
• SECURING=EXPLAIN  = EXPLANTION
• MASTERING = EVALUATE = LINK

WORD WALLS:

A simple word wall

Learn - Remember - Revise - Use.

I think word walls are brilliant.  They have proven their use to my classes though I admit I never knew what they were called when I started out!  Simple ones like the one here contain the key words that should appear in answers on the topic of Votes for Women.  It's in a giant V for VOTEs and in the Suffragettes colours of purple and green.  Each topic on the GCSE wall had its own key word letter - I for Indian Independence, A for the America unit and a big pink G for Nazi Germany.  These visual queues helped the children to recall the words in the exam and improve their answers in general.

Examples from a more detailed Word Wall

I've also made more detailed word walls. These contain photos and descriptions that can also be used as flashcards or as pointers in a living graph.








In the end, displays are only as good as they are useful and engaging. My students tell me that they use the ones in my rooms and that they are helpful.  I see evidence of this when I ask questions and they refer to the information on the walls or when students are peer and self assessing and use the language on the grade descriptors.   Just remember to cover everything up when there is an assessment -  it takes ages!

Let me know your best display ideas in the comments below!

'Who lived in a house like this?'

...David, its over to you.

I love local history. There I said it.  I say this to teaching colleagues and they look at me askance like I've just said I was into collecting oddly shaped rocks.   (Unless they're a geography teacher, they usually get it.) It may get me some funny looks in the staff room but I think finding out about the place in which you live and work is fascinating and offers an intriguing insight into how the community came to be what it is.

Once again Local History is back on our television screens.  BBC has been showing David Olusoga’s ‘A House Through Time’ which traces the history of one house in Liverpool and it’s surrounding area from when it was built to present day.  When I turned on the tv I was reminded of the local history lessons I taught a few years ago and wrote an article on.

I taught in a north London comprehensive school for many years and every year we would teach the Year 7 students about the history of the area.  It is an ethnically and socially diverse community and often the students we were teaching had only recently moved to the area or even the country.  Learning about the area helped these kids in particular to find their place and realise that it had always been a pretty transient population.

Wood Green had been a hamlet for hundreds of years and was mentioned in the Domesday book.  It had a couple of farms and a pub.  Farmers would drive their cattle through the village on the way to market in London.  Nothing much changed there until the 19th century and the coming of the railways.  It became an attractive place for white collar workers to live and commute in to city.    By the early 20th century the farms had gone and had been replaced with rows and rows of terraced housing.  During the war, the town suffered some bomb damage and now the terraced avenues are flecked with small 1960s blocks as replacement.  In the 1980s a massive complex was built and it became a hub for north Londoners out to do their shopping on a Saturday.

Wood Green has a great selection of housing stock to look at and study.  A few years ago we chose

The road we selected for our study. 

a street that represented this change over time.  It was two minutes away from our school gates so we could walk there with a trail of students and it had houses dating back to the 1850s right up to the 1980s.  The class was split into groups of 4 and each group was allocated a house.  The aim was to find out all they could about its past residents and how things had changed for the occupants over time.

The students LOVED it!  We provided some scaffolding and the historical materials and they were away. Using the original censuses they discovered the names and occupations of their residents, with photographs they imagined what the people may have looked like.  When visiting the street the children compared architecture and style of the buildings. In the classroom they used map layering to see how the area changed through the period and they were able to make judgements on whether they thought these changes were a good or bad thing.  Over several lessons the groups built up a picture of who lived there.  When the groups learned to decipher the copperplate writing on the oldest census reports they felt like explorers decoding a new language.  The sense of achievement in the class was palpable.

Half of a living graph. 

In the end, each group produced a house of sugar paper filled with their findings. We put them all together on the wall to build our own street and everyone gave verbal feedback on their displays. One of the most interesting things the students did was to use their imaginations to decide how happy their house would have been at different points in its history.  This was designed to get them thinking about the bigger picture of changes over time and the impact the may have had.  The children really put a lot of thought into this, evaluating how a house might feel to be empty or full or to have competition for entertainment outside the home for example. Their ideas were explained on a living graph and threw up some fascinating insights.

 





They had learned so much and been so engaged in the whole process.  Importantly they learned in a practical way that history is not the complete task, rather it’s a recreation of it from the remnants of what we have left.  The children realised that they could never know everything about their house and it’s previous tenants but by making reasoned inferences based on the evidence they could produce an idea that would stand up to scrutiny.

How to do it:

1. Make friends with your local history archivist.  They are usually found at your local library or, if you have one, the local history museum.  In my experience these people are only too happy to help.  Our local museum archivist helped me to gather the maps, photos and census materials and then rooted around for anything else she thought I could use including telephone directories, advertising pamphlets and posters! She was invaluable and pleased that local children were learning about their past.

2. Gather as many resources as you can lay your hands on.  You’ll be surprised how they can come in useful. Also generic history books to help your students put their house in a wider context.

3. Use Google Maps to scope out the potential streets in your area before you start.  The street view function is great for seeing what the area lookalike on the ground.  Google Maps is also a fabulous tool if you are unable to physically take your class out to the street.   I used it as an introduction before our visit to familiarise the children with the place and  task at hand.

4. You might consider signing up to an online ancestry website.  I did this primarily to save me more trips to the archive but it was also great for easy cross referencing and transcribed versions of original documents. I was able to see where the residents had gone to with the click of a button. I used  Find My Past and the site was easy to navigate and had all the information I needed at the touch of a button.

If you would like an in-depth explanation of how the lessons were structured and our findings you can read the full article here in Teaching History magazine.



I hope you decide to investigate the history on your doorstep and if you do, please let me know how you get on!

And a happy new year!

UPDATE- Looks like I didn’t press Publish when I wrote  this in JANUARY 2017!  But it’s still valid and the sentiment is the same so here you are!


Morning!  I hope you are all enjoying the break as much as I am.  I could technically sleep past 6am for a whole fortnight with no school to go to. But that would mean convincing my unconscious self that its actually ok to get up at 8am and that I can turn off my automatic alarm. With things I obviously failed to do last night. So here I am awake at 6.30am with a coffee and a walked dog.

Thoughts have been turning to the next term. (Yes, the geek inside me never stops.)  I don't like the Sept-Dec term. It feels like Christmas is one giant 'hump-day' in the middle of the year, an annual Wednesday to get past.  Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas!  I love all the fun things, the gift-giving, the food, the school activities and carol concerts.  I just hate the way that over here in the UK it gets darker and darker and more drizzly as the weeks go on leading up to the holidays.  No snowfall for us, just fog and mizzley rain. And its such a LOOOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGG term!

So when the new year hits I'm right in the mood for a bit of renewal.  The winter solstice has been and gone so now its official, the days are getting longer and the half term is only 6 weeks. That's doable. And the exam students have finally realised that they're leaving school in about 5 months and start to panic and focus in lessons.  They may even come to revision classes!

Have a great New Year and may it bring you all the you need and all the happiness you deserve!

"Hi Ho, Hi Ho..." etc, etc, etc...

Its that time of year again.  The day before teachers all over the UK return to the classroom for a fun-filled year of educating!  This is why I am currently avoiding the planning that I have allowed to build up and am writing a blog entry instead.  The ultimate in 'productive procrastination"...

I have, however, been through the resources on my computer and as there are over 14 years worth in there it has taken  substantial proportion of my time.  I just wanted to share a couple of my quick, go-to resources that are in my folder every September.

1. The first one is this poster. 'Three Before Me'.  We all want our students to be as independent as possible in their learning but with the ability to find out the information they need.  I loved this idea the moment I saw it and now this poster goes on my classroom door and and wall from the start of term. (I once made them all stick it in their workbooks just to really drive home the message, but the photocopying budget has since shrunk!)






2. Another resource I always have to hand for my early finishing historians is this set of critical thinking cards.  When I found these on Teachers Pay Teachers by 'Got to Teach' I knew my students would love them and so do I. They take so much of the stress of creating extension activities away.  Just get your early finisher to select a card with a question on it and they can use any text you like to answer it. Ingenious!
Critical Thinking Cards.

3. I don't know about you but I love using DBQs in my history classes. Source are the meat and drink of history and its these skills the students will need if they are to achieve the best they can in the subject.  To help them, a few years ago, I created these help cards. They give clear instructions on how to attempt a range of document based questions with sentence starters and success criteria. I laminated them and handed them out and I have never looked back.  My students keep them in a wallet in their folder and can refer to them at any time.  Its so heartwarming to see them being used without prompting. AND it supports the '3 before me' idea. Win - Win!




4. And finally so the kids can actually write their fantastic inferences and ideas down I make everyone
of them P.E.E.L!  My first lesson back with my classes wouldn't be complete if I don't hand these bad boys out and tell them all to stick them in their books.  Every have a POINT, EVIDENCE, EXPLANATION and LINK sentence forcing them rot explain and evaluate their arguments.  Great for those that have trouble when faced with a blank page as well as you higher achievers who sometimes miss out a stage and skip to the evaluation with out evidence. PEEL MAT


However you start your year,  I hope these ideas have been helpful and the very best of British luck to everyone heading on into school tomorrow. And if you have longer than that - I'm insanely jealous! ;0)

Time Travel and the jet-lagged mind...

I am writing this in the bathroom at 4am in the morning.  I have jetlag and don’t want to wake up The Mister or the baby so I’m killing time in here.  We’ve been travelling 23 hours but my brain won’t switch off and has taken me back to various childhood holidays and how we’d kill time then instead. 

When I was a child we spent a couple of weeks every summer at my Grandparents by the sea. They were what I’d call ‘Proper Grandparents’, in that they were old for as long as I can remember. There was no chldrens’ TV allowed and the set didn’t go on until the 6 o clock news while we ate our dinner.  But we went on drives in the country to see odd places with farm animals or rescued dogs, or spent days at the beach with Gran in a deckchair, and most importantly, as soon as we got there , my Gran always took us round to the library to get a temporary membership card.  I have no idea if public libraries still do this, but it was a brilliant idea. We could take out up to 8 books for a fortnight and in those books lay my escape from potential boredom!  My sister and I tried to learn ballroom dancing from a book with drawings of all the steps.  (As an avid follower of Strictly Come Dancing now, I don’t think our quickstep was particularly accurate but we had fun in the garden…)  and I learnt several magic tricks to wow my friends and I can still remember them now.

I was, however, primarily obsessed with ghosts and time travel.  In the library I made a beeline for anything with ‘ghost’ or ‘time’ in the title. And this is how I found two of my favourite children’s books of all time: ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ by Madeleine L’Engle and ‘The Ghosts’ by Antonia Barber.  

I loved them for a number of reasons, especially their explanations of space and time travel.  I had a bit of a hidden desire to be an astronaut when I was 8 and I think this played to that nicely.

In A Wrinkle in Time (1962), a clever and awkward girl must rescue her scientist father with the help of her young brother and friend as well as Mrs Who, Mrs Which and Mrs Whatsit.  It’s a great story about good versus evil and conformity but as I say, I was most interested in the space/time travel dimension of the book.  L’Engle  explains the use of  a Tesseract to cross through space.  L’Engle’s characters propose that the world is made up pf 5 dimensions, the 4^th being Time and the 5^th the dimension you travel through.  She described space as a kind of vast expanse of cloth. For an ant to crawl from one point to another would take an age. But if you ‘wrinkle’ the fabric, two distant points can come together.  This she called a Tessering.  Written in 1962 it was progressive for its time. Some of the maths is considered ‘wrong’ now but the concept of a Tesseract or hypercube has stood the test of time and research.  Either way, this book sparked a real interest in science, time and space for me and thousands of other kids and that can never be a bad thing! 

  

The Ghosts by Antonia Barber is a slightly different deal.  Set in the Edwardian period, two children go with their widowed mother to a derelict mansion house devastated by fire. She is to be the housekeeper.  A mysterious old gentleman named Mr Blunden arrived at their door in Camden and offered her the job personally, asking the children if they would be afraid if they saw a ghost... 

Not to give too much away, the two children have to travel in time to save the day. It’s all thrilling fun and adventure, but again the bit that always struck me was the way the author explained the time travel part.   In this book time is described as being like a wheel.  All points in time are therefore linked by the spools and, given the right circumstances, a person could travel along one to the centre of the wheel (where time is still like the eye of a tornado) and travel across to another time point on the wheel.   In my mind this made complete sense.  As a child I would try and concentrate really hard and see if I could separate my mind from my body and go back in time.  Needless to say it never worked. But again, it sparked my imagination and kept boredom at bay.  

Anyway, thats my rambling done for now.  I highly recommend you check out these books, if not for you then for your kids or your classes.   So thanks Gran and Grampy for switching the telly off and making us read!

Right - I'm off to find something else to read...

Stalin's Rise to Power.

How did Stalin rise from his beginnings as a Georgian peasant to become the Communist ruler of the USSR by 1928?

This 5 minute video explains how to assess the main reasons why Stalin, and not Trotsky, succeeded Lenin.  Using a 'diamond' structure it explains how to assess causation and create a valid argument before showing you how to write it all up as an essay. This was designed to help GCSE students and won the Jamie Oliver Dream Teacher Award 2011.

Have a go with any causation question yourself.   All you need is a pack of post-it notes and a sharpie pen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNGsAcx7z-Y